Still Feeding Off the Corpse of New Orleans

In spite of the pious wailing at all levels of government about “rebuilding this glorious city,” a prostrate New Orleans seems to be able to draw only vultures to the party. The latest to stick their snout in the trough of the reconstruction spoils is a politically well-connected pump company, Moving Water Industries, of Deerfield Beach, Florida, reports the Associated Press today. Connected? The owner of MWI and Jeb Bush were partners in a company to market these pumps, and the owner, J. David Eller, has given almost $130,000 to the Republican party in the last several years.

(All the following quotes from the AP, full text here on Newsvine or here on Yahoo)

MWI has run into trouble before. The U.S. Justice Department sued the company in 2002, accusing it of fraudulently helping Nigeria obtain $74 million in taxpayer-backed loans for overpriced and unnecessary water-pump equipment. The case has yet to be resolved.

So they had this “competitive bid” for de-watering pumps for the levee flood gates, and MWI got the contract. Then what? They jammed them in last summer, and starting in the fall they began to test them for real. Trouble arose almost immediately, and the AP obtained a copy of a memo reviewing the situation.

The memo was written by Maria Garzino, a Corps mechanical engineer overseeing quality assurance at an MWI test site in Florida. The Corps confirmed the authenticity of the 72-page memo, which details many of the mechanical problems and criticizes the testing procedures used.

[snip]

In her memo, Garzino told corps officials that the equipment being installed was defective. She warned that the pumps would break down “should they be tasked to run, under normal use, as would be required in the event of a hurricane.”

The pumps, 60 inches in diameter and capable of moving 200 cubic feet of water per second, are run by pressurized hydraulic oil. The supercharged oil cranks up a hydraulic motor, which in turn spins water-moving propellers. The pumps failed less-strenuous testing than the original contract called for, according to the memo. Originally, each of the 34 pumps was to be “load tested” — made to pump water — but that requirement for all the pumps was dropped, the memo said.

Of eight pumps that were load tested, one was turned on for a few minutes and another was run at one-third of operating pressure, the memo said. Three of the other load-tested pumps “experienced catastrophic failure,” Garzino wrote.

Now to the Corps of Engineers’ credit, they have withheld 20% of the payment on the project pending successful resolution of the situation, and they appear to be attempting to hold MWI’s feet to the fire, but it still reeks of a sweetheart deal, and the Corps is still stuck working with them, which continues to generate revenue for MWI:

Just in case [the pumps didn’t work], the Corps brought in numerous portable pumps last year and plans to do the same thing this year, officials said. In the meantime, the Corps has paid MWI $4.5 million for six additional pumps, and will use them to troubleshoot the defective ones, Bedey said.

The Corps said MWI has paid for all other expenses incurred in fixing the pumps — shipping them back and forth from a facility in Gray, La., and installing and reinstalling them.

Looks pretty much like the Administration sent around one of their friends for some of the spoils, and the poor career people in the Corps are trying to make the best of a very poor situation. Oh, and most of the wreckage from Katrina’s impact remains on the ground in the city of New Orleans. How much of that could have been hauled away for all this money, if the Administration had chosen to spend it making the reconstruction of New Orleans possible, instead of just feeding the maw of their friends?